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Somewhere on the Seventh Cloud

Maekar

A rock. A rock. Maekar was not surprised. This was what could be expected of House Peake – never a fair fight. He was immensely disappointed, though, for this was not how he had envisioned his death. He had always imagined a proper battle, not a thing that would not leave much of him to be retrieved.

He was also a little… proud, as ridiculous as it was. For all the stormy events in his life, it had taken a bloody rock to take him down. A proper rock. But he was sorry for Swift. Such an amazing battle horse. He had deserved better, whatever divine punishment his master had merited. Maekar looked over his shoulder, hoping despite reason to see that Swift could still be saved. Of course, he couldn't, Maekar saw it even through the circle of men scrambling to get his own dead, beaten body out.

"A little proud, are we?" a voice that he had only been hearing in his dreams for over twenty-four years asked. His heart in his throat, he turned… and everything fell back in place.

Baelor wore the face he had worn when he had been about thirty, and a wide grin on that face. All of a sudden, Maekar felt stupid beyond belief. How many a night he had laid awake, wondering if in these final moments Baelor had thought that Maekar had meant it? As if it had ever been a real possibility!

"No, no, do not apologize," Baelor said quickly, raising his hands to prevent such a thing happening. "I've been watching you for over two decades and I say that you have more than served your sentence. Now, about this rock…" He smirked. "I always did tell you that you needed a rock to best you, did I not? A rock against a rock."

"You did," Maekar confirmed and for the first time in over twenty years took a full breath. He had never tasted air this sweet. Especially not in the Red Keep.

He looked at his reflection in the side of the goblet Baelor handed him with the strange warning to sniff it first. He looked… young. About twenty. No, younger. If Baelor looked his best age, it made sense that Maekar would too… and the year when he had been twenty had been one of the worst in his life, with Dyanna's terrible ailment. Nineteen, then. He frowned. He did not feel nineteen. He felt the weight of each one of his years and then some.

Baelor nodded. "It's odd indeed," he agreed. "But it will pass. You are the age you look like but at the same time, you feel the burden of your lifetime experiences."

"Quite odd." Maekar turned back, staring at the battlefield. "Do they need to waste all this effort so retrieve a body?" he asked, irritation stealing in his voice. "They have a battle to win."

His brother stared at him and then laughed, shaking his head. "I can't believe you," he said. "I just… can't believe you. It's your body we're talking about… but that's what Fireball always taught us, right? The one who wants to win needs to stare right ahead, at the victory and nothing else."

His smile died as they both remembered that this was the reason Baelor had died twenty-four years before his time… Maekar's focus. They looked away from each other.

"That's better," a vaguely familiar voice said from behind and yet Maekar was sure he had never seen the man who had appeared from nowhere… or the throne room. Oh, he was a Targaryen, this fair hair and the purple eyes left no doubt. Finely chiseled features… Maekar could imagine that the newcomer could be quite charming when he wanted to but personally, right now he found nothing prepossessing n this faint smile and the glint in the eyes that could be taken as humourous but Maekar could immediately see that it was nothing other than a smirk. "I've always wondered if Baelor was indeed this nonchalant about the fact that you killed him. It isn't natural. Even the Dornish would think so."

Baelor sighed. "Pay him no mind," he advised. "Once you get better at arranging your environment, he's going to disappear or… not appear."

Maekar gasped. "Do you seriously suggest that I… hide from him? Is this what you're doing?"

"He's quite good at this," the man answered instead of Baelor.

Instead of Baelor.

"Is he speaking for us already?" Maekar asked, quite calmly in his own estimation. "Am I supposed to let him speak for me?"

Baelor gave him an urgent look. "Listen, Maekar, don't…"

Too late. Maekar drew his hand back and his fist connected with the mildly smirking face. With a soft splashing sound, a spurt of blood erupted from the other's nose. Maekar listened intently but there was no sharper sound. The man reeled back.

"What?" Baelor exclaimed. "You broke my nose but you didn't do it with his?"

Maekar snorted a disbelieving laugh. "Are you offended?" he asked.

"To the seven hells, yes, I am!" Given to his memory, Baelor absent-mindedly rubbed the bridge of his own nose and the two of them headed down the hall, leaving the bleeding man behind. Maekar turned once to look at the battlefield but Baelor firmly dragged him on.

"You can't do anything. If you watch too long, you'll go mad with the urge and inability to help."

Maekar doubted that true madness was possible for one who had not got it in life but he did not object. He simply followed his brother's lead. "So, who was this one?" he asked. "Looked quite unpleasant."

"He was," Baelor said. "You just had the honour to meet our lord grandfather in his prime."

This stunned Maekar speechless. He had heard many people say that his grandfather had used to look like something but he had not expected to be unable to recognize him. No wonder that Aegon had been a constantly embittered, petty man – he had literally been digging his own grave for years and he had known it. But he felt the warm glow of contentment. How often in his childhood years spent in King's Landing on Aegon's will and whims had he dreamed of the time he would grow old and big enough to squash his grandfather like a bug?

Baelor looked around, his smile showing that despite his restrain, he was not displeased as well. "Who are you looking for?" Maekar asked. "Father?"

The suggestion came to his mind spontaneously. While Daeron Targaryen had always insisted that violence was the last resource smart people should turn to, Maekar did have the strong feeling that right now, he would have said…

"That's a good boy," Baelor said seriously but his eyes were laughing. "Here, I said it for him."

Maekar didn't say anything, his mind racing from the moments he had heard this in his childhood, both absent-mindedly and in those great moments when their father had actually paid attention to what he did, to the moment he had heard what had happened to Baelor. What he had done to Baelor. He shook his head. "No," he said.

You are a good boy,Baelor thought. You didn't mean it and as prickly and unapproachable you are when you're offended, you did all you could to rule well. I know it and he knows it. It's different now. But there would be no use to say it. It was not different for Maekar. Not yet. He would see how different it was in this afterlife, in time. He looked around, thinking that Dyanna should have been here. Her exchanges with Aegon were legendary. Last time, she had snapped that her husband would teach Aegon his place for her in the only way Aegon could understand. Maekar had done this – and Dyanna had not been here to see. I'll have to remember all of this to tell her later, Baelor thought. Dyanna was prone to roasting everyone slowly for the tiniest details – and expected people to tell stories like she did. But well, this was a story that Baelor would not mind telling over and over for her sake, and his own.

Dyanna appeared from a side door as they were crossing a marble-floored court and Maekar stopped dead in his tracks. For years he had tried to summon this exact image into his mind – the lovely girl from before the illness. Fair skin glowing with life, a sparkle in violet eyes casting wit and enticement from under lowered eyelashes, dark hair cascading wildly down her back in the privacy of their own chambers... This had been the only way to keep his sanity because if he did not succeed to push the image of her last months away, he would have started screaming.

But here she was, smiling this smile of joy and welcome that had always made him feel alive. Her eyes were brimming with tears which made him think that she was sad about him being dead, although this had brought him to her, at last. She was warm and felt real, her heart beating as quickly as his – he could feel it through the fabrics. But he felt something else as well and drew back, surprised, to give her another look.

Now, her smile became one of grief. "Yes," she said. "I am twenty-two indeed."

"Why?" he asked, stunned. With everyone here being the years that had been their best, that meant that Dyanna had felt this way after the first bout of illness? After the removal of the lump? After she had been too afraid to leave her chambers because of what she perceived as her mutilation?

"You never believed me when I told you I was the happiest I had ever been in my life then, did you?"

"No," he replied truthfully. He had always taken it for one the tales Dyanna had lo loved to spin, one of her ways to make life better, something that she had done for him. It had never occurred to him that it might be the truth.

She nodded dejectedly. "Saryl used to tell me that you didn't seem to believe me," she confessed. "I only believed her… after. To her credit, once she arrived, she never told me, I told you so."

His surprise was overwhelming. He looked around, as if he expected for Saryl Lothston to appear, invoked by the mentioning. "She's here as well?"

Dyanna shrugged. "She never had much of a family before she came back to Summerhall after my death," she said. "Her time with her husband was too short. Of course she's here. As unhappy as this used to make me, she's now one of us."

An unhappy Dyanna was a Dyanna who became even more inventive. Maekar's focus suddenly cleared because this meant danger. "You said it used to make you unhappy?" he asked cautiously.

Dyanna sighed and started walking him around a Red Keep that was and was not the same he knew. The changes were subtle and seemed to… be taking place? Like, now? "You know, at the time she got her treatment, we used to sit and wonder if it had been successful. I went so far as to suggest that she found a man to… test it. She was shocked," Dyanna admitted honestly. "But you see, I never offered you. Of course I used to be unhappy! I wanted to be your only one even after my death."

"You were," he said. "For a long time."

"But not forever." Dyanna sighed. "Well, I didn't really expect it, so I was able to make my peace with it – and her. She was my friend, after all. We reached an agreement."

Maekar wasn't sure that he liked the talk about agreement, especially when knowing that he was not about to be asked if he agreed with it. And he had the feeling that he knew what they had agreed upon. Sharing him? He would now live with two women in turns? Three, once Aelinor's time came as well? In the afterlife? When he had been faithful each bloody time? It felt foul. This was a situation worthy for Aegon the Unworthy, not for a man like him! But as unholy as the agreement looked to him, he couldn't come with anything better. He certainly didn't want to live alone - and he could never choose. The type of bond had been different with each woman but they had all been strong.

Still, a week only had seven days. They could never be divided equally. He could already hear – and agree with – Baelor's comment, once his brother realized what the situation was. "The best part of it? You have one day off."